On Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 12:55 PM, Jeremy Stanley <[email protected]> wrote: > It's intentionally ambitious, yes, because we want to inspire and be > inspired to great achievements.
I generally don't think that that approach works for a large community, except in the rare cases of where you have both an utterly awe-inspiring goal and a one-sentence definition of what "done" means — like "before this decade is out, land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth" —, but I fully appreciate that people will strongly disagree with me on that one. So let's not get into that discussion. :) > At the same time, the comment period > and public review process are totally about getting some grounding > in reality from the community, keeping us honest with ourselves as > to what is or is not a reasonable goal (seeking exactly the sorts of > analysis you've provided here). We want to be sure both that our > choices of focus reflect the people we've been elected to represent, > and that those same people can see some possibility for reaching > these goals. > > So to turn this around, if we were to keep it at a 2-year vision > do you believe we should lower our target metrics or reduce the > number of things we're seeking to accomplish through the technical > community (or a bit of both)? I don't like to think in "target metrics", but looking through the draft there are several items which look like ambitious 2-year goals by themselves: - Constellations. This is an extremely impactful goal where, I believe, some organizations with entrenched business practices would take 2 years to come aboard *even if upstream had already completely decided right now.* OpenStack distributions as offered by vendors are, currently, normally general-purpose, and to tailor this to specific reference architectures is a massive undertaking for an organization (including its support engineers, QA/QE people, presales, and sales people). Consider that the vision draft talks about a world where constellations already "have become the new standard way to start exploring OpenStack." If in 2 years constellations are already meant to the new and accepted standard, that requires all hands on deck right now. - Multi-language outreach. Yes we do have OpenStack and OpenStack-related code in other languages like Go and Erlang, but adjacent communities perceive OpenStack as primarily a Python project. Many non-Python OpenStack SDKs were lagging behind the Python ones for so long that they were barely usable, and we need to win back a lot of trust from non-Python communities even after "Go, Nodejs, or Java" support is on par with, or comparable to, Python. Again, if you want to convince those communities that they are now first-class citizens in OpenStack land, that would take 2 years by itself, I'd imagine. - Adjacent communities, and using OpenStack code in non-OpenStack environments. The vision calls for "thinking differently about adjacent communities". Again, this is a massive community-wide undertaking, and much more easily said than done. Yes, some projects (Swift comes to mind, as does Ironic) have made a conscious effort to be valuable independent of an OpenStack environment. In others, we've seen an effort that has since died down somewhat — the last time I heard serious discussions about standalone Heat, for example, was in 2014. Now, you could argue that it's a big community, we can do all those things in parallel. Parallelization is problematic to take for granted in collaboration (cf. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1975), but even if we assert that it can be done (with a lot of effort), then it only makes sense for goals that do not run counter to each other. Constellations are all about standardization, which cuts down on flexibility, multi-language outreach is the opposite. Incorporation of OpenStack code into non-OpenStack projects is also counter to standardization, or rather requires going by the rules of said projects, not OpenStack, and thus again runs counter to the goals of constellations. My humble opinion here is pick one goal. As for the others, you'll have to see how they play out. Then, in two years, reassess and pick the next goal. Thus, to answer your question, I'd say reduce not the number of things you're seeking to accomplish through the technical community, but through the explicit guidance of the technical *committee.* Cheers, Florian __________________________________________________________________________ OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscribe http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
